Lucifer showrunners on bringing the series back for a sixth and final season

Lucifer is one of those shows which just can't stay down; after beginning life at Fox several years ago, the series was cancelled after three seasons before Netflix came to the rescue. The streaming service renewed Lucifer for a fourth and fifth season, which were expected to be the last we'd see of Lucifer Morningstar (Tom Ellis), but Netflix surprised fans when they decided to officially bring the series back for a sixth and final season last month.

Given that Lucifer was supposed to come to a close with season 5, you might imagine that springing a sixth season might have played havoc with the plans of showrunners Joe Henderson and Ildy Modrovich. While speaking with Entertainment Weekly, the pair said that Netflix approached them about a possible sixth season while they were busy writing what was to be the series finale. Their first reaction was to say no, but they had a change of heart after a couple of days. "It was very, very similar to when we went from 10 episodes to 16," Henderson said. "[We were] like, 'No, this is perfect. If we do this, it'll ruin everything! Then three days later, you're like, 'Wait, how could we not have done this?'" Modrovich added, "What we realized is that the last bit of that [series] finale episode was actually a lot of great stories sped up just to give us a satisfying ending for all our characters. We literally lobbed off Act 6 and went, 'Let's take what happens in Act 6 in a scene and dive into it, and really explore how are characters end up where they ended up.' So, that ended up being our nugget for season 6." This time around, the sixth season really will be the end of the series, and Henderson and Modrovich are thrilled with how the new finale is shaping up.

"It's the story we were always going to tell, but just written much larger and to me [now] so much more interestingly that it breaks my heart to think we weren't [originally] going to do it this way," says Henderson, adding they're more confident in the new series ending than the one they initially plotted out. "When they were like, 'Can you do one more?' we said, 'Yes, but this our last story.'" Modrovich adds: "In addition to what we're opening up from that ending, we thought of one giant story that just needed to be told, so that's what really stuck the landing for us."

As far as how the sixth season renewal will affect the upcoming fifth season (especially considering that it was supposed to be the last), it shouldn't change much. "That was another request we had [for the studio and streamer]," Modrovich said. "We said, 'Please don't make us what change what we have. Please don't make us water it down,' because we were so pleased with it and it's so impactful. Again, everybody was just very on-board with it.'" The first half of the fifth season of Lucifer will debut on Netflix on August 21, 2020.